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which they come to pass; and His foreknowledge of future things and also of contingent events
rests on His decree. This solves the problem as far as the foreknowledge of God is concerned.
But now the question arises, Is the predetermination of things consistent with the free will of
man? And the answer is that it certainly is not, if the freedom of the will be regarded as
indifferentia (arbitrariness), but this is an unwarranted conception of the freedom of man. The
will of man is not something altogether indeterminate, something hanging in the air that can be
swung arbitrarily in either direction. It is rather something rooted in our very nature, connected
with our deepest instincts and emotions, and determined by our intellectual considerations and
by our very character. And if we conceive of our human freedom as lubentia rationalis
(reasonable self-determination), then we have no sufficient warrant for saying that it is
inconsistent with divine foreknowledge. Says Dr. Orr: “A solution of this problem there is,
though our minds fail to grasp it. In part it probably lies, not in denying freedom, but in a
revised conception of freedom. For freedom, after all, is not arbitrariness. There is in all rational
action a why for acting — a reason which decides action. The truly free man is not the
uncertain, incalculable man, but the man who is reliable. In short, freedom has its laws —
spiritual laws — and the omniscient Mind knows what these are. But an element of mystery, it
must be acknowledged, still remains.”[Side-Lights on Chr. Doct., p. 30.]
Jesuit, Lutheran, and Arminian theologians suggested the so-called scientia media as a solution
of the problem. The name is indicative of the fact that it occupies a middle ground between the
necessary and the free knowledge of God. It differs from the former in that its object is not all
possible things, but a special class of things actually future; and from the latter in that its
ground is not the eternal purpose of God, but the free action of the creature as simply
foreseen. [A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theol., p. 147.] It is called mediate, says Dabney, “because
they suppose God arrives at it, not directly by knowing His own purpose to effect it, but
indirectly by His infinite insight into the manner in which the contingent second cause will act,
under given outward circumstances, foreseen or produced by God.”[Syst. and Polem. Theol., p.
156.] But this is no solution of the problem at all. It is an attempt to reconcile two things which
logically exclude each other, namely, freedom of action in the Pelagian sense and a certain
foreknowledge of that action. Actions that are in no way determined by God, directly or
indirectly, but are wholly dependent on the arbitrary will of man, can hardly be the object of
divine foreknowledge. Moreover, it is objectionable, because it makes the divine knowledge
dependent on the choice of man, virtually annuls the certainty of the knowledge of future
events, and thus implicitly denies the omniscience of God. It is also contrary to such passages of
Scripture as Acts 2:23; Rom. 9:16; Eph. 1:11; Phil. 2:13.